Churchill and Trump

I had to post an Amazon review regarding this ridiculous book, Trump and Churchill: Defenders of Western Civilization.  Who knows if it will stay up.

As a huge Winston Churchill fan who owns most of his books and has made a pilgrimage to Chartwell, I was interested in this book. Unfortunately I couldn't make it past the free Kindle download portion of this ridiculous work.  Aside from the horrible research, which previous reviewers have already covered, the premise of this book is completely absurd. The author argues, not only that Churchill and Trump are similar (based on superficial things common to many politicians like the fact that they didn't get along with the press) but that Trump has actually done more to defend western civilization than Churchill, based on... uhh... owning libs on Twitter as best as I can tell. As a long time conservative, I am all in favor of owning the libs on social media, but I find it hard to compare to, I don't know, DEFEATING NAZI GERMANY?

The author picks out a couple of other superficial things to make his argument, "they love their country". OK, are there many politicians who run around claiming not to love their country? They both are alpha males! Uhh, yeah. Churchill was a Sandhurst graduate who served in 4 wars, and even became famous for escaping as a POW in South Africa. Trump received 5 draft deferments and bragged that avoiding the Clap was "his Vietnam". Yeah, a lot of similarities.

Both of them are good communicators, he argues. Uhh, aside for being one of the highest paid war correspondents for a while, Churchill wrote over 30 books. He received the Nobel Prize for literature. Trump has a couple of ghost written books, and incorrectly misspelled "Noble" several times in a tweet. He is famous for his inability to even read 4 page intelligence briefs, much less write thousands of pages on the Second World War or the Duke of Marlborough. Churchill gave us, "their finest hour" and "We will fight on the beaches". Trump gave us "American carnage" and "Covfefe".

I decided to give the author another shot and watched his CSPAN interview on this book, and it was even worse. He actually cites the scene in the movie the Darkest Hour of Churchill hanging out in the London Tube with commoners as an example of how he related to the average person, just like Trump!  Only one problem though. It never happened. It was made up entirely for the movie.

Doubtless this book will still sell plenty of copies to Trump fans, eager to pump up their hero (Trump himself has even tweeted promoting it) but anyone seriously interested in history should look to serious works. I highly recommend Andrew Roberts "Churchill: Walking With Destiny", Eric Larson's recent "The Splendid and the Vile" and if you want a comparative work Thomas Rick's Churchill and Orwell. This is book is to be avoided unless you are a Trump sycophant, in which case you will probably love it, but then again, Twitter is free.